Bedside Studio: Inside Gelaroar’s Creative World of Music, Memory, and Identity

If you have ever gone down a rabbit hole so deep that you came out the other side having planned a whole photoshoot, built a mood board, and picked out your outfits and your lip color, then you already understand how Angela Manaloto thinks. Angela, who goes by Gelaroar online, is a Filipino illustrator and marketing professional based in Pampanga, Philippines, and her creative process is basically just obsession with extra steps. Very intentional, very beautiful extra steps.

She sat down with us for our new Bedside Studio series to talk about what it actually looks like to grow up online as a Gen Z creative, how pop culture quietly forms your entire design identity before you even have a name for it, and why the most important thing any young artist can do is stop being afraid of being cringe.

Ask Angela where their creative identity came from, and nostalgia will enter the room. Because the honest answer goes back further than she expected. She was six years old in 2008 when she first got into K-pop, and at the time she had no idea she was watching a masterclass in marketing unfold in real time. She just thought the music was good and the choreography was incredible.

But here is the thing about growing up with K-pop. The industry runs on a very specific release structure: teasers, then music videos, then live performances, then multiple album versions, each one building anticipation and rewarding the fans who stayed close. Angela absorbed all of that before they ever took a marketing class. By third grade, she was teaching her classmates to read and write in Hangul just because she loved it that much.

"It was just a silly hobby, a silly little interest that I consumed every day. But now that I think of it, it is actually kind of the basics of marketing. How to put yourself, or a product, out there."

That is what makes Angela's story so interesting to follow. The things that shaped them the most were never labeled as inspiration at the time. They were just things she loved completely and without apology. The skill development was a side effect of the things she loved fiercely.

That habit of deep immersion never really left Angela. It just evolved into a creative method. These days when Angela finds something they are fixated on, they do not just enjoy it casually. They go all the way in. The example she kept coming back to during our conversation was the Hayley Williams album she has been living inside lately. Not just listening to it. Living inside it. Eight hours on loop. Then a mood board. Then outfit planning. Then a full creative shoot.

Her Paramore-themed graduation photoshoot is proof of concept. While her classmates arrived at the studio all glitz and glam, Angela showed up with lipstick on their teeth on purpose, fully committed to the bit and the vision they had been building in their head. That is not impulsiveness. That is a creative process that starts long before anyone else in the room even knows a concept is forming.

Her birthday shoot this year followed the same logic. The concept started as a mood board and grew into a full mini music video inspired by a song called Parachute, with separate outfits planned for the photoshoot and the video itself. The vision was theirs from the start: freeing and deeply emotional in the woods, and she brainstormed the whole thing with her close friend and fellow creative, Angela Angeles, who shot and edited the video and photos. Angela only stepped in to edit a few of the final pictures herself. A collaboration built on trust.

There is a pattern in the work Angela is drawn to and the work they make themselves. At first glance, it reads as vibrant, whimsical, full of color. Look closer, and there is something raw being said. They described a self-portrait they made that works exactly this way, eye-catching and vivid on the surface, but loaded with meaning if you actually look at the details.

This comes from growing up genuinely curious about art that breaks the rules. While other kids were uncomfortable with messy, imperfect, or confrontational art, Angela was the one leaning in and asking what the story was. That instinct, to want to know the lore of everything, still drives how they create and what they put out into the world.

She pulls from Disney storytelling, the alternative music scene she got into as a teenager, Hozier, Arcane, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, Little Women. Two different worlds that somehow produce one very specific emotional register. The combination of something that feels safe and beautiful and something that makes you feel a little too much at once.

One of the most practical things Angela said in the entire conversation was about how they navigate being a creative who lives on the internet, surrounded by trends and algorithms and aesthetics that are constantly shifting. Their answer was not to ignore trends or pretend the internet does not exist. It was to run everything through a personal filter first.

She advocates for self-expression and inclusivity, values that are heavily influenced by the queer community she draws inspiration from, and those values act as a kind of north star. If a trend connects to something she genuinely believes in, she engages. If it does not speak for her, she lets it scroll past.

"Regardless of what trends are currently on social media, I try to connect them to be relevant. So when I put it out, it's not just heavily influenced by the media I consume. It also speaks for me as an artist, and also as a person."

We ended the conversation by asking Angela what she thinks she has been carrying without fully realizing it, and her answer was one of those ones that lands quietly and then keeps going. She said she realized she is unique, but that if everyone is unique, then she is also just like everyone else. And somehow, that does not feel like a contradiction to her. It feels like a relief.

"I'm special. But not that special. It just means it's a shared experience. I get to connect with everyone going through the same things I have. No matter how heavy or how good they are. I love that I have people that relate to it."

That is the thing about creative identity for Gen Z. It is not built in isolation. It is built through absorption, through repetition, through the albums you played until the lyrics felt like your own memories, through the films that marked specific versions of you, through the K-pop releases you watched obsessively at age six without knowing you were learning how storytelling and marketing work at the same time.

Everything you have ever loved is in your work somewhere. Angela has always known this. She just needed Bedside Studio to ask the right questions.

If you take one thing from Angela's story, make it this.

"Believe that you're not too cringe for anything. Shame would be your number one enemy. The first step is to put your work out there and to put the effort in doing it. That would lead you to many opportunities and possibly lead you to the right people that will help you."

You can follow Angela on her creative journey at Gelaroar. She is here building visual worlds from fixations, one eight-hour loop at a time.